There are few titles that have matched the overall success and media/consumer hysteria that the Call of Duty series has come to command. While it is easy to understand Activision’s success considering the high quality and unrivaled online communities surrounding each annual release, it is interesting that before Call of Duty 4 adopted a modern setting, the series was one amongst what most considered too many in the diluted WWII shooter genre. When Call of Duty 4 released it was proclaimed a hugely innovative title- that its use of the post 9-11 political global climate reinvigorated the first person warfare genre. But was the near-future lens on warfare such an inspired and game-changing move? Considering a handful of titles that proved the foundation for the military shooter and FPS’ in general, it’s easy to sight Modern Warfare’s inspirations, and subsequently the sub-genre it has now nearly entirely buried.

It has become rather happenstance that while playing Call of Duty, a teammate (insert cool badass dude you follow here) calls out something to the effect of, “place a plastique, we’ve got to breach the door.” The player’s digital hands extend to place a small satchel of explosive on said door, the door detonates, and the player pulls a rifle in slow-motion to see a “terrorist’s” gun full extension, about to assassinate the very target the group was commissioned to rescue. If the player is quick enough, they are able to drop every and any attacker before any harm, to the hostage or otherwise, can be done. What entails is one of three things. 1) A high speed getaway on some kind of small engine vehicle. 2) A high speed escape as the compound inexplicably begins to self-destruct. 3) Some type of exchange where the player ends up thrown to the ground, everything slows once again, and the player watches helplessly as someone dies and then is afforded the must-win situation of saving a more-important secondary character. These moments, which seem to come more frequently with each CoD release, are meant to punctuate the experience, giving one a hyper-synesthetic high, a sense of invulnerability. The feeling that the player is the last-action hero that Schwarzenegger never could be.

It is the fireworks and fist-pumping (bumping?) of this moment that make it so important for another reason, because it also punctuates everything the military shooter has lost. In the summer of 1998, just over a year before Medal of Honor began the WWII shooter craze, Rainbow Six made waves for its attention to realism and steep learning curve. In missions designed to replicate real-world hostage situations, players were faced with single shot deaths and the necessity to coordinate the maneuvers of two teams to successfully prevent innocents from being killed and subsequent mission failure. Delta Force, which released later that year, presented players with similar trappings in conveying a hyper-realistic sense of detail oriented warfare. Both utilized modern settings and sparked a greater trend, with titles like the SWAT series, to capture the realism and fragility of life which comes into play on a true battlefield. Where CoD gives players a macho-head rush, the tactical shooters of the ‘90s played out like a fearful game of chess where one’s shrewd and acute decisions were far more important than an inflated sense of bravado in the, while more limited than something like Halo or Resistance, walking bullet shield common in the modern military shooter.

Nothing encapsulates this better than the mandatory planning stages of Rainbow Six that occurred before every stage. Planning door-breaches, assigning proper equipment to the right team members, and coordinating the simultaneous movement between a player’s alpha and beta squadrons was an absolute must to successfully complete a mission. The satisfaction of taking down hostiles while the muffled shots of one’s second group of squad-mates echoed through corridors and closed door is something woefully absent from CoD and other military shooters of today. These past titles were experiences of minutiae. Outside what was at the time a violent exterior, games like Rainbow Six and Delta Force challenged players’ intuition and ingenuity, and it was this test of intelligence that made the experiences so satisfying. While each level was a blank tablet, conquerable in any manner of ways, failure was absolute if time wasn’t taken to think tactically.

As the Tom Clancy franchises proliferated, broadening in scope whilst remaining just as shrewd in the Ghost Recon titles, over time the formula to their DNA, not to mention the tactical shooter of old, was transformed nearly totally. Titles like Advanced Warfighter and even the upcoming Rainbow Six feature as little hard-thinking as any other military shooter on the market, swapping one-bullet mission failure for the standard waves of enemies and checkpoint related battle escalation.

Continued World War means the future will be X-plosive.

But what if Call of Duty hadn’t gone modern? Hadn’t adopted the new-fangled weaponry of modern military complexes the world over and palette-swapped Nazis for indiscriminate Middle Eastern extremist factions. Over night the FPS genre was turned on its head along with every forthcoming November time-frame for releases. Perhaps the “true” modern military shooter may have gained more traction, grown to entertain a broader swathe of the market share. Most would argue that if it still commanded any relevance, that the two might exist together, but Call of Duty 4 shrunk the entire genre to almost singular context, forging a winning formula that proves to still be the “only” mode of first-person gameplay. But as the franchise wears thin in regards to the consumer-base’s mindshare (conversely and obviously sales are better with each year), it is interesting nonetheless to consider what could be next?

Perhaps the next step for the franchise and genre as a whole is one more sideways than forward, taking into consideration the pragmatism of titles’ past that set the foundation for what is so common today, and seemed only relevant for seconds along the digital evolution of the video game medium.

Comments (4)

I wouldn't be playing them if it didn't

I was really into the first couple Medal of Honors back on PS1 I think it was. I thought the AI was cool (they would throw grenades back at you lol) and the setting was fresh back then. Then it got to the point where the majority of shooters on the market were all WWII. The setting was beat to death, the weapons became boring, the stories became played out, even all the pro-USA nationalism and Nazi-killing goodness was played out and there was nothing left to beat to death. Going modern was the best things the series could've done and I loved it when they did. I give CoD their due and I play the games, but I still prefer Rainbow Six and Halo.

When I want future I go with my beloved Halo, and when I want some modern military shooting I go with Rainbow Six. I started playing those games back with the first one on N64 and I loved it. My best friend and I back in elementary school were like 10 years old and would come home from school to play Rainbow Six co-op and we loved it.

I think we would still ...

... be seeing experimentation within the FPS genre had Modern Warfare not found success. Perhaps there would have been more entries in the first-person adventure sub-genre, that houses games like Turok 1/2 and the Metroid Prime series. We might have seen more detailed and dynamic shooters, that could have expanded the WWII setting (or other famous battles) along the lines of Star Wars Battlefront's Galactic Conquest mode. Perhaps we would have seen fewer IPs forced into the genre. But we'll never know, all because of a single game.

Definitely.

I agree with Temperance in that we'd still be seeing some experimentation, but I would hope experimentation outside of cheap ways to add gameplay time (the whole Prestige thing is so stupid). Modern Warfare honestly was the beginning of the end for the Call of Duty series, at least the end of their dignity. CoD 2 was awesome - the sniping was superb, the graphics were pretty killer (for the time, of course), but best of all, the multiplayer experience was tactical and fun, not rush+spray and pray. Doom 2 is the way to go for FPS' anyway - you want a good deathmatch? Check out some of the source ports for Doom 2, it's like Quake 3 on meth.

It saddens me that FPS' have all become so generic, Battlefield and Call of Duty might as well be one in the same, and the only FPS games that have come out recently that do anything really different were Borderlands and Serious Sam (such a good game, holy crap), which both have their merits, the RPG elements and metric shit-tons of (huge) enemies, respectively.